An environment includes entities and resources as well as the relations among them. An exemplary environment includes an economy. An economy includes economic agents, goods, and services as well as the relations among them. Economic agents such as firms can produce goods and services in an economy. Operations management includes all aspects of the production of goods and services including supply chain management, job shop scheduling, flow shop management, the design of organization structure, etc.
Firms produce complex goods and services using a chain of activities which can generically be called a process. The activities within the process may be internal to a single firm or span many firms. A firm's supply chain management system strategically controls the supply of materials required by the processes from the supply of renewable resources through manufacture, assembly, and finally to the end customers. See generally, Operations Management, Slack et al., Pitman Publishing, London, 1995. (“Operations Management”).
Other types of entities similarly perform service using processes. As a non-limiting example, military organizations perform logistics within a changing environment to achieve goals such as establishing a beachhead or taking control of a hill in a battlefield.
The activities of the process may be internal to a single firm or span many firms. For those activities which span many firms, the firm's supply chain management system must perform a variety of tasks to control the supply of materials required by the activities within the process. For example, the supply chain management system must negotiate prices, set delivery dates, specify the required quantity of the materials, specify the required quality of the material, etc.
Similarly, the activities of the process may be within one site of a firm or span many sites within a firm. For those activities which span many sites, the firm's supply chain management system must determine the number of sites, the location of the sites with respect to the spacial distribution of customers, and the assignment of activities to sites. This allocation problem is a generalization of the quadratic assignment problem (“QAP”).
For the activities of the process within a site of a firm, the firm's job shop scheduling system assigns activities to machines. Specifically, in the job shop scheduling problem (“JSP”), each machine at the firm performs a set of jobs, each consisting of a certain ordered sequence of transformations from a defined set of transformations, so that there is at most one job running at any instance of time on any machine. The firm's job shop scheduling system attempts to minimize the total completion time called the makespan.
Manufacturing Resource Planning (“MRP”) software systems track the number of parts in a database, monitor inventory levels, and automatically notify the firm when inventory levels run low. MRP software systems also forecast consumer demand. MRP software systems perform production floor scheduling in order to meet the forecasted consumer demand.
Firms must also design an organization structure. The structure for an organization includes a management hierarchy and a distribution of decision making authority to the people within the organization. The structure of a firm effects the propagation of information throughout the firm.
Previous research for supply chain management has studied the effects of demand on the production rate at earlier or upstream operations along the supply chain. Additional research has classified the different relationships which exist in supply chains. This research has classified supply chain relationships as: integrated hierarchy, semi-hierarchy, co-contracting, coordinated contracting, coordinated revenue links, long term trading commitments and short term trading commitments. See Operations Management, Chapter 14.
Previous research for MRP has produced algorithms to compute material volume requirements and to compute timing requirements for those materials using Gantt charts. Other MRP algorithms such as the Optimized Production (OPT) schedule production systems to the pace dictated by the most heavily loaded resources which are identified as bottle-necks. See Operations Management, Chapter 14.
Additional research has attempted to automate the exchange of goods and services among buyers and sellers. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,689,652 discloses a method for matching buy and sell orders of financial instruments such as equity securities, futures, derivatives, options, bonds and currencies based upon a satisfaction profile using a crossing network. The satisfaction profiles define the degree of satisfaction associated with trading a particular instrument at varying prices and quantities. The method for matching buy and sell orders inputs satisfaction profiles from buyers and sellers to a central processing location, computes a cross-product of the satisfaction profiles to produce a set of mutual satisfaction profiles, scores the mutual satisfaction profiles, and executes the trades having the highest scores.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,501 discloses a matching system for trading financial instruments in which bids are automatically matched against offers for given trading instruments for automatically providing matching transactions in order to complete trades using a host computer. Likewise, U.S. Pat. No. 5,727,165 presents an improved matching system for trading instruments in which the occurrence of automatically confirmed trades is dependent on receipt of match acknowledgment messages by a host computer from all counter parties to the matching trade.
However, previous research on operations management has not adequately accounted for the effect of failures or changes in the economic environment on the operation of the firm. For example, machines and sites could fail or supplies of material could be delayed or interrupted. Accordingly, the firm's supply chain management, job shop scheduling and organization structure must be robust and reliable to account for the effect of failures on the operation of the firm.
Similarly, the economic environment changes with the introduction of new goods and services, new production technologies, new legislation and the extinction of older goods and services. Similarly, changes in the supply and demand for materials also effects the economic environment. For example, the contingent value to buyer and seller of goods or services, the cost of producing the next kilowatt of power for a power generating plant, and the value of the next kilowatt of power to a purchaser effect the economic environment. Accordingly, the firm's supply chain management, job shop scheduling and organization structure must be flexible and adaptive to account for the effect of changes to the firm's economic environment.
Moreover, previous research for automating the exchange of financial instruments have disadvantages. Most important, these methods have a limited application as they do not apply to the general exchange of goods and services among economic agents. Instead, they are focused towards financial transactions. Next, the trades for each of these systems must be processed at a central computing location. Next, these systems do not have real-time support for trader preferences which vary with time.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a system and method to determine reliable and adaptive processes for performing one or more tasks.